Traffic Control of the Future

petra13 writes "A high point of the Autonomous Agents and Multi Agent Systems conference this past week was Kurt Dresner and Peter Stone's paper 'Multiagent Traffic Management: A Reservation-Based Intersection Control Mechanism.' They designed an automated system where cars reserve a time to pass through an intersection as they approach it and are then sped up or slowed down to ensure their arrival at exactly the right time. This allows traffic to enter the intersection from all directions simultaneously, eliminating the need for traffic lights and considerably reducing delays caused by stopping traffic. On their website, you can find Java applet simulations to illustrate the system. Especially impressive looking is the six lanes of heavy traffic in all directions simulation. I would love to see this in real life (from a safe distance of course)."

Comments

Chicken and egg...

[Faies]

Insurance companies will want real proof that such a system will be stable and as secure as today's intersections before even half-considering it.

Such proof for this system will require that ALL cars in the area be equipped with such systems and an equally large number of intersections handled.

This roadblock to development was what happened to a demo for a system in which cars controlled by computers would follow magnets in a road and drive within 1m of other cars. That was a couple of years back in San Diego.

If cars are going to be automated someday, we'll need to find some compromise which does not require implementation for all vehicles on a road- i.e. a lane for truckers on long stretches of highway.

That's just my 2 cents. Something like this would be really cool should we ever get to this point....or we could just get flying cars and fly over :)

Custom sim shows it better

[t_allardyce]

Stick the granularity on 3 and try:
N: 2 - .04
E: 4 - 1
S: 2 - .06
W: 4 - 0.1

you can see the system cue the cars on the east -> west road up and create little 'gaps' in the flow across all lanes that sync up with the north/south cars as they cross, nice to look at but it really needs turning and lane crossing, on the low granularity the cars get more clearence which is abit more realistic :P